France orders ISPs to block Polymarket, enforcing prior ban
France's national gambling regulator, the Autorite Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), ordered internet service providers on Friday to block access to Polymarket. The action enforces an existing November 2024 ban on the CFTC-regulated prediction market platform. European regulators increasingly classify event contracts as unlicensed gambling rather than exempt financial instruments. Spain temporarily banned Polymarket and Kalshi in May.
Polymarket's European market is shrinking as national regulators trade notes on enforcement. The French ISP block applies an existing ban, proving regulators need no fresh authority once they classify event contracts as gambling. Polymarket must now choose between costly country-by-country litigation, abandoning EU retail users, or local licensing negotiations its infrastructure was not built to support.
The French order and Czech blacklist share the same mechanism: ISP blocks plus payment bans. The 15-day Czech compliance deadline and France's immediate financial transaction ban leave no negotiation window. Rival platforms face identical product-classification risk across the EU.
France joins the Czech Republic in ordering ISP blocks against Polymarket this week, with both regulators citing unlicensed gambling classification and applying existing frameworks rather than new legislation, while Italy renewed its block days earlier and ESMA's July 3 warning continues to give national regulators direct cover to treat CFTC-regulated event contracts as covered binary options.